Picture yourself in a corporate conference room in 1988. The company has just announced another round of layoffs. Morale, as they say in the business literature, is “challenged.” The leadership team has gathered to discuss how to restore enthusiasm among the remaining employees. Someone proposes stricter performance metrics. Someone else suggests mandatory team-building exercises. And then, in that moment when the absurdity of the situation becomes almost unbearable, someone mutters a line that captures the entire circular logic: “The floggings will continue until morale improves.”
The room erupts. Not in agreement, but in recognition—the kind of laughter that comes from seeing something painfully, perfectly true stated aloud.
This is the gift of Herb Caen’s San Francisco, a city of writers and wits, gossips and truth-tellers. Caen spent decades as a columnist for the San Francisco Chronicle, accumulating the kind of cultural authority that came from actually knowing the people in your city, from sitting in the right bars, from paying attention. He wasn’t famous for scholarly analysis or political grandstanding. He was famous for noticing things. For catching the moment when a well-intentioned policy becomes obviously, ridiculously counterproductive. For translating the unspoken frustrations of ordinary people into sentences that made them laugh at themselves.
The quote about floggings and morale seems to have coalesced in the late 1980s, though its genealogy is complicated and partly obscured. What matters more than pinning down the exact moment is understanding that it emerged from precisely the kind of culture Caen inhabited—skeptical, sardonic, attuned to the gap between what institutions claim and what they actually do. Before Caen, before the 1980s corporate version, the sentiment had traveled through centuries. Voltaire had made a similar observation in 1759 about the execution of Admiral Byng, remarking in “Candide” that sometimes you had to kill an admiral “to encourage the others.” The Frenchman was skewering the logic of punishment as motivation. It is an absurd equation: harm the people in front of you to inspire the people around them. Yet it persists, dressed in different languages and eras.
Caen was the kind of writer who recognized continuity across time precisely because he was attuned to the moment. He understood that the same human folly repeats itself, that institutions forget what they know, that people in power sometimes implement policies that achieve the opposite of what they intend. His genius was in naming it clearly enough that you couldn’t unknow it.
The thing about the floggings quote is that it doesn’t argue. It doesn’t provide evidence or build a case. It simply states a contradiction so stark that the contradiction itself becomes the entire message. If you are beating people, their morale will not improve. The statement seems to insult your intelligence by saying something so obvious. But it insults the intelligence of leadership in equal measure—because the contradiction, obvious as it is, keeps manifesting in actual policy. The beatings continue. The metaphorical whips keep falling. And somewhere, someone always believes that this time, finally, the suffering will transform into commitment.
What gives the quote its staying power is that it works across contexts. Change the noun and it fits anywhere: “The layoffs will continue until morale improves.” “The pay cuts will continue until morale improves.” “The mandatory Zoom calls will continue until morale improves.” The flexibility of the formula is key. Each generation can insert its own particular form of institutional sadism, its own contradiction between stated goals and actual methods. The quote becomes a mirror.
In the decades since it entered circulation, the phrase has become the kind of thing that appears on office memes, in angry Reddit threads, in the dark humor of people who work in large institutions. It surfaces in military contexts, corporate contexts, academic contexts—anywhere humans are organized into hierarchies and someone at the top has decided that the solution to demoralization is to make things worse. The quote persists because the problem it describes persists. We have not solved the fundamental paradox of power: that those who wield it are often the last to understand what effect it’s having on those beneath it.
Caen himself lived in a San Francisco that was rapidly changing, that was already becoming the kind of place where earnest institutions and sprawling egos could flourish side by side. He watched the city transform from a post-war boom town into something more complicated, more self-conscious, more prone to examining itself. His column was the record of that consciousness. When he articulated truths about human nature and institutional folly, he did so from within a community, not from above it. This matters. The quote doesn’t feel like an attack from an outsider. It feels like a friend in the room telling you what everyone is already thinking.
What does the quote ask of us today? Perhaps this: that we notice the gap between what we say we want and what we actually do. That we recognize the moments when our solutions have become indistinguishable from the problem. That we maintain a skeptical eye toward authority, including our own authority if we find ourselves in a position to exercise it. Caen’s contribution was not to solve anything. It was to hold up a mirror. To say: look at what we’re doing. Look at how it doesn’t make sense. And if you can laugh at it, you’re at least still awake.
The floggings will continue until morale improves. It’s funny because it’s preposterous. It’s true because we keep doing it anyway.